Mass storage device selectors are known in the art. These known mass storage device selectors are operatively couplable between a host computer and a plurality of mass storage devices such as, for examples, bootable or data hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), Blue-Ray, DVD or CD-ROM drives, or any other types of mass storage devices that can share data with a host computer through a standard IDE or SATA, among others, peripheral data port thereof.
In some instances of the prior art, the mass storage device selector is represented by a printed circuit board, or PC board, that can be installed in a free motherboard bus slot of a host computer. In other instances of the prior art, the mass storage device selector is represented by an external device of the host computer, and provided with suitable link cables coupled to power and/or data peripheral ports of the host computer.
In turn, these known PC boards and external devices are provided with multiple power and/or data port connectors to which can be operatively coupled a corresponding number of mass storage devices.
Typically, a custom software program associated with the mass storage device selector is loaded and installed in the memory of the host computer for allowing a user to select and access one of the mass storage devices operatively coupled to the host computer.
While these known mass storage device selectors of the prior art can generally fulfill the main objective of allowing a user to select and access one of the mass storage devices through a host computer, they generally entail one or more of the following disadvantages.
Data port selectors of the prior art generally represent complex assemblies and consume processing resources of the host computer. Thus, they are generally correspondingly costly to test and market.
They further generally require a software installation on the host computer, thus generally adding delays in the power up, or boot time, of the host computer, as well as representing an additional malware vulnerability for the host computer.
Furthermore, the known mass storage device selectors of the prior art generally channel data between the host computer and the mass storage devices through multiple stages of gated integrated circuits and thus, generally cannot guaranty the highest transfer rate rated for a given IDE or SATA data port. For example, a SATA data port revision III can reach up to a 6 Gb/s data transfer rate, and addition of additional components between the host computer and the mass storage device increases the likelihood that such a high data transfer rate will not be achievable. An additional factor of data transfer rate degradation resides in that the mass storage device selectors may allow the sharing of the maximum bandwidth performance among all the mass storage devices coupled therewith.
In some instances of these known mass storage device selectors of the prior art, selected data and/or control lines and signals from the motherboard of the host computer are necessarily used for completing a user selection of a mass storage, which significantly raises the complexity of implementation of such selectors.
In some other instances, a bootable mass storage device cannot be operatively coupled to the mass storage device selector, which significantly reduces their usefulness.
Furthermore, these mass storage device selectors may force a greater electrical consumption on the power resources of the host computer due to their necessity to periodically poll each mass storage device coupled therewith.
Against this background, there exists a need for an improved mass storage device selector operatively couplable between a host computer and a plurality of mass storage devices. An object of the present invention is to provide such an improved mass storage device selector.